Once (2007)

directed by John Carney

Sophia Stewart

They look so young. His beard is still red, her face is still round. Glen is busking late at night on a street corner in Dublin, playing guitar and singing a stunning song about heartbreak, and Markéta is watching him. We don’t know how long she’s been standing there. When he’s done, she claps, the sound muffled by her mittens, and tosses ten cents in his guitar case. When she asks, he tells her the song he’s just played is an original. “How come you don’t play it during daytime?” she wonders.

“During the day, people want to hear songs they know, just songs that they recognize,” he says. “I play these songs at night. They wouldn’t listen.”

“I listen.”

It’s not just, as we see later, that she politely listens—she really hears his music. Listening takes effort, and hearing is all intuition. You either hear it—that ineffable it—or you don’t.

I heard Once before I saw it. According to my iTunes library, I downloaded the Once soundtrack on January 24, 2010; I would have been 11. Eleven was the last time I really felt like a kid: my parents hadn’t yet split, my period hadn’t yet started. I listened to a lot of Lady Gaga and Nirvana and Broadway cast recordings, and wrote songs on my mom’s Casio keyboard, mostly about how much I hated middle school.

Everything changed when I listened to the Once soundtrack. I don’t know if, at age 11, I could really hear the songs in their fullness, but I sensed a new horizon opening up before me. I hadn’t known that music could sound like this, could move me like this, and with that revelation I was initiated into a musical sensibility that would stay with me for the rest of my life.

I wanted to be Glen Hansard. I’d never heard a voice like Glen’s before. Raw and robust, honest and wise. He sang because he was wounded, he sang because it was urgent, he sang because it was all there was left to do. And I’d never seen anyone play guitar like him, either. His guitar—a top-of-the-line Takamine—had a large hole in its body, evidence of prolonged and passionate use. The hole entranced me: it sat next to the soundhole like a second mouth. In YouTube video after YouTube video, I watched his pick scrape at the soft cedar of the Takamine’s body, a loving erosion. When Glen plays “Say It to Me Now,” the stunning song, you understand the hole. The song is a desperate plea—“If you have something to say / say it to me now”—and during its crescendo he strums so hard and so fast that you fear for the guitar. (More than once he’s broken a string while performing it.) But he’s never careless with his instrument—he and it are one. Impossible to tell where his body ends and the guitar begins.

When I finally did watch Once, with my parents in our living room, I was bored by it. Too much mumbling, and those drab colors. I couldn’t understand, when we got to the scene where Glen and Markéta go to a music shop and play a song together for the first time, why my dad was crying. Once has, admittedly, become somewhat tainted in my mind’s eye by my own nostalgia and the conspicuous age gap between its leads, but to this day I cherish it—after all, it belongs squarely to my favorite subgenre of movie, People Falling in Love to Music. I always wanted to be a Person Falling in Love to Music.

*

When I was 12, some boys from school asked me to join their band. One of the boys, Theo, the guitarist, was my best friend. At weekly band practice, he noodled on his red stratocaster while I did my best Hayley Williams impression. Under the guidance of a college-aged mentor (himself a gifted musician), the five of us wrote our own songs, honed some semblance of a stage presence, and even booked some gigs. To say Theo and I also like-liked each other doesn’t really do it (that ineffable it) justice. Beyond being tethered by a continuous flow of texts, Skype calls, and AIM messages, we were bonded in a profound way that, we both conceded, felt dauntingly grown-up. We loved each other in the purest and most elemental sense; we heard each other.

The band split up when we all began attending different high schools, but Theo and I kept playing music together. My freshman year I learned to play guitar, and the two of us would duet all the folk mainstays of the early 2010s: The Civil Wars, the Milk Carton Kids, Bon Iver. Glen and Markéta. We weren’t half-bad—the warm blend of his Taylor and my Seagull, the precarious harmonies of our mid-pubescent voices, it made for good music. I imagine to onlookers we made a charming teenage duo. For me, it was serious: in the moment, playing together, complementing his strumming with my fingerpicking, singing the melody to his harmony, I wanted nothing else. I wanted to do this, next to him, forever. The music we played, the music we listened to—I knew he could hear what I heard. And to be understood that way is to be empowered: I started writing my own songs, making my own recordings, playing my own shows. Was Theo my first love, or was it music? Yes.

When Glen Hansard was 13, he dropped out of school to start busking. He wanted nothing else. For teenage Glen, as for teenage me, love and music were the same. At 20, he formed the band the Frames, and 15 years later, in 2005, he and the Czech multi-instrumentalist Markéta Irglová formed the duo the Swell Season. (Glen had met Markéta many years earlier, when he was 31—and she was 13.) A year later, filmmaker and former Frames bassist John Carney enlisted Glen and Markéta to star in his new movie, Once. On set, the two became involved. "I had been falling in love with her for a long time, but I kept telling myself she's just a kid," Glen, 37, told Entertainment Weekly about the 19-year-old Markéta. "There was definitely the feeling we were documenting something precious and private."

I remember, in high school, being enamored with Glen and Markéta’s love, and seeing traces of it in my teenage romance with Theo. Now, having been 19, I feel more disturbed than inspired by their relationship. The troubling power dynamics at play onscreen are undeniable—though so is the tenderness between them. Once I began playing music with Theo, I could finally locate the pathos of the music shop scene from Once: it’s beautiful because they understand each other, and I hadn’t before realized how rarely that happens between two people. On film and in life, Glen and Markéta are bound by something beyond language, beyond sex—bound by their art. But in the end, not even that could keep them together.

In truth, I thought the song they play at the music shop, “Falling Slowly,” the film’s Oscar-winning runaway hit, was one of the weakest on the soundtrack. But as an infatuated 16 year old I could finally hear it. “Falling slowly / eyes that know me / and I can’t go back”: I couldn’t imagine a life without Theo and the music we shared. But eventually, inevitably, we broke up and lost touch. I kept making music, and the music I made was better—more sophisticated, more truthful—than anything I’d done when we were together. I improved at guitar; I learned GarageBand; I played shows. I felt like a real musician, a real artist. I was also unspeakably sad.

In our twenties, Theo and I reconnected. We fell back together. At that point, music had slipped from the center of my life. I missed it terribly; I missed him too. At our local diner we talked about busking together, drafted a list of duets we could do, the kinds of songs that passersby would recognize. He was going to teach me to use Ableton, help me pick out my first electric guitar. I was ready to reorient myself around music and Theo, to recapture the momentum of years past. Then, one day, he vanished; said goodbye and left town, traceless. Not even the music could keep us together. “Part of me has died / and won’t return,” Glen sings on the title track of Once. I accepted that Theo had taken my music with him.

*

A year after Theo’s disappearance, I started going to a local open mic to play my songs. My first time, I played a song I’d written about Theo—the first song I’d written in two years. I played it on the electric guitar that I’d bought for myself, without Theo’s guidance. I hadn’t yet bought an amp for it, so I’d never heard it out loud before—its vibrations filled the room as I played. I was creating a new sound, one that was entirely mine. The people in the audience listened to my sad song, though I wasn’t sure if anyone really heard it. I didn’t care. I could have stayed up on that stage forever. I felt good—really good. Like I wanted nothing else.

When I pitched this essay in July, I had planned to end it right about here: with my bittersweet return to making and playing music. The triumph of rediscovering myself, by myself; the grief of having to do it alone. I would gesture obliquely to music as being both a way into love and out of heartbreak. I would mention that a few months ago I saw Glen Hansard in concert for the fourth time (two of them had been with Theo, in high school and in our twenties), and that this time I went alone. He and Markéta had embarked on a reunion tour. I was older and they were older. Glen’s beard was grey now, and Markéta’s face had thinned, and they still sounded beautiful together. Glen sang his stunning song and I was 11 again and could hardly believe that songs could sound like that. After the show, I went home and played on my Seagull all the songs from the Once soundtrack that I still know by heart, which is most of them.

But what I should mention, I suppose, is that not long after I pitched this essay, it became apparent that someone in the weekly open mic audience had, in fact, not just been listening but hearing me and my songs. That he liked what he heard when I played just as much as I liked what I heard when he played. And that over the course of some months we’ve been People Falling in Love to Music. What is it Glen sings on “Trying to Pull Myself Away,” the penultimate song on the Once soundtrack? Right—“Everything comes if you just let it be.”

Sophia Stewart is an editor and writer from Los Angeles. She lives in Brooklyn and tweets @smswrites.